What happens to award seats when they are cancelled?

[Kangol]

This is going to be a far fetched idea but I'll put it out there anyway.

If you are booking an award seat on QF metal with either AA miles or QFF points, what happens to the seat when you cancel it? Does it just go back to the pool ready for the next person to book it?

I had an idea that you could "hold" a classic award ticket on QF metal booked 355 days in advance with your QFF points, then when the 330 day window for AAwards opens up, cancel the award ticket and get your points and cash back (minus the 5k QFF points fee) and then buy it again with your AA miles, albeit at a lesser price.

You'd have to ring up straight away or be on the line to both in case someone with EF had an alert and was quicker than you were...

Surely someone has already thought of this at some stage....

The next step would be using your WP/P1 status to open up previously unavailable award seats and if they then go back into the pool, snap them up immediately! (or should I say snAAp them up?)

Thoughts?

 

[JohnK]

From memory in previous threads the cancelled award seat does not return to original inventory.

Think of someone cancelling an award seat ~1 week from travel on a very full flight. I do not think Qantas will let someone have that seat cheaply.

 

[Kangol]

From memory in previous threads the cancelled award seat does not return to original inventory.

Think of someone cancelling an award seat ~1 week from travel on a very full flight. I do not think Qantas will let someone have that seat cheaply.

Thanks, interesting to see another POV.

On the flipside, Qantas already had someone have that seat cheaply and they got the "benefit" of "getting it back" plus the cancellation penalty.... if they get something for it, then I guess that is a bonus, esp at 1 week out.

Another scenario would be someone cancelling an award seat 10 months out on a presumably empty flight.. is it more likely to go back to inventory than the 1 week out cancellation?

 

[JohnK]

Ah the black art of yield management.

As far as I am aware there is no hard and fast rule that an award seat is going to return to the original inventory. It may with some intervention but that would entirely be up to yield management.

Serfty is usually very good with these good things but he is off on his birthday trip to the USA.

 

[vitagen]

I had 2 QF first class flights which after I changed the date the original tickets returned to the pool

 

[markis10]

I have had some go back within 24 hours, while others have seemed to be returned a week later, or maybe that was just yield control having a rethink?

 

[fersea]

When I was looking at purchasing points earlier in the year and using them for a first class award, I put one on hold a couple of time for LA - Syd and about an hour after the five days ran out it was back available. Did the same with the flight from London - Melbourne afterI worked out it was only another 20K points to fly MCO-ORD-JFK(LGA first)-LHR.

However I don't think there is any hard and fast rule that the seat much become available again.

 

[serfty]

It really depends upon whether "yield management" think they'll more likely to sell the seat for revenue than for an award(or vice-versa"niche